


Dusk

by canistakahari, Mackem



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Brain Injury, Coma, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-26
Updated: 2012-09-26
Packaged: 2017-11-15 02:37:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canistakahari/pseuds/canistakahari, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mackem/pseuds/Mackem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>McCoy builds a house. It's large, and perfect, and it also isn't real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dusk

**Author's Note:**

> Established relationship, angst, fluff. This began its life as an RP, but has been expanded upon and reformatted and edited. Beginning and ending song lyrics are property of Matthew Good. The song is “Dusk”.

***  
  
 _Quickly, quietly lost  
Dust covers everything up_  
  
***  
  
“He has constructed a dwelling,” says Spock, as he breaks the meld.   
  
Jim knows him well enough to see that Spock is deeply unsettled, despite the fact that there are no visual clues on his face to suggest this.   
  
“What?” demands Jim.  
  
“Doctor McCoy has built a house,” restates Spock. His long, pale fingers drift with hesitant uncertainty over McCoy’s forehead and then drop away.   
  
“While I appreciate your attempt to make sense in layman’s terms, I’m still not sure what the hell you’re talking about, Spock,” says Jim.   
  
He thinks, in spite of the fact that he keeps forgetting to eat or sleep and sometimes to breathe, that he’s doing an admirable job of staying calm in the face of the ten-foot wall they’ve hit in the last few days. It’s amazing how much frustration, fear, and worry can be wedged into the pit of someone’s stomach without said individual succumbing to the overpowering desire to throw up and never stop. The real challenge is not looking down at McCoy’s motionless body, not staring with desperate unhappiness as he wills him to wake.   
  
He’s been unconscious for days. Spiking brain activity. Injuries healed, so why –  
  
“Captain,” interrupts Spock, gently.   
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I believe I can take you to him.”  
  


oOo

  
  
Jim opens his eyes to the clear, bright-blue sky of Earth.   
  
There’s grass under him, soft and green as it brushes, ticklish and itchy, against his cheek. Jim doesn’t move, doesn’t even try to get up until that peculiar sense of freefall leaves him, the tug in the center of his chest that dragged him down and down, through clouds of cosmic dust and yawning light-years of space, like a fish on a hook.   
  
Even before he gets up, Jim knows, in his gut, that there’s something inherently wrong here.   
  
He gets up slowly, bits of grass and dirt tumbling from his hair. It’s warm, in a vague sort of way, and the farm spreads out for miles, greenery and trees rambling out to the dark-blue mountains on the very edge of the horizon.   
  
It’s a bit like sitting in a postcard or a photo, a snapshot capture of some far-off locale that’s a reminder of a half-forgotten vacation. There’s an utter absence of wind and, even more disturbingly, no birdsong. Jim can’t smell baked earth, and when he rips up a handful of the lawn and presses it underneath his nose there’s no cut-grass scent of summer, hot and fresh, and it doesn’t leave behind green smudges on his fingertips.   
  
The farm house juts up against the sky like an ancient, squat little castle two-hundred yards away, three stories tall and crooked with age. It’s painted a crumbling off-white, broken eggshell colour, with a wrap-around porch like the one Jim remembers from his mother’s house in Iowa. It dredges up something sad and small inside him, a sick feeling of hopeless resignation.   
  
Eager to dispel his own creeping memories, Jim starts to walk. He doesn’t aim for the farmhouse; instead he walks toward the range of distant mountains, feet crushing the grass as he trudges endlessly on through the field.   
  
The closer he gets to the mountains, the harder they become to see.   
  
Eventually, the landscape wavers nervously, as if it never expected him to go this far, and then everything goes a little fuzzy around the edges.   
  
Jim can’t drag his body any further, the air thickening around him like mud. Giving up before he pulls a muscle, he turns back around.   
  
There’s someone out on the porch.  
  


oOo

  
  
“Hey there,” says Jim, when he’s standing within twenty feet of the house. “Nice place you’ve got here.”  
  
“Well, I’ll be damned,” drawls McCoy, “Another visitor.”  
  
 _Fuck_  if that feeling of desperate relief isn’t like a cold bucket of water dripping down Jim’s spine.   
  
“Howdy,” grins Jim, with a geeky little wave. He’s raw inside, stripped bare in the face of Leonard McCoy, whole and healthy and  _awake_ , leaning casually against the peeling white paint of the house, loose and relaxed in threadbare jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, and an old, blue plaid shirt that’s rolled up to the elbows. It’s an image of McCoy that Jim has never seen before; there’s no tension in the slightly stooped line of his back, his jaw lightly-stubbled, hazel gaze steady and faintly intrigued.   
  
“What can I do for you?” asks McCoy, holding out his hand. “I’m Leonard McCoy, by the way.”  
  
Jim steps forward to take it and the familiar warmth of his handshake is like heartache. “Jim Kirk. I’m just passing through.”  
  
“Oh yeah?” says McCoy, slipping his hands into his pockets, eyes drifting searchingly over Jim’s face. “Well, Jim, you want some lemonade?”  
  
Whatever it is that Jim’s expecting – fireworks going off, or frantic not-real kisses (even though Spock warned him that Bones didn’t seem at all aware that this was wholly removed from anything truly real) – definitely doesn’t involve lemonade. He laughs, surprised and delighted by the concept. “You’re right outta the nineteenth century, huh?”  
  
The disbelieving eyebrow McCoy raises almost makes Jim want to cry. “Manners and a nice glass of homemade lemonade never go out of style. No skin off my back if you refuse, kid.”  
  
Jim pushes past the low-level anxiety and fear that’s gripping his heart and sets aside the part of himself that wants to grab Bones and demand, “Wake up, you stupid, stubborn bastard,  _wake up_!”   
  
“Homemade?! You’re actually offering me homemade lemonade, Bo – Leonard?”  
  
McCoy pushes himself off the wall and shrugs a bit, gesturing into the rambling ranch house and saying, “Well, sure, kid, why not? Either that, or Jocelyn’s sweet tea, whichever you like. You wanna come in and sit for a spell? Sun’s getting hot.”  
  
 _Jocelyn’s sweet tea_.   
  
Jim’s stomach does a tiny, uncomfortable flip. “I’ve never tried real, Southern sweet tea,” he says smoothly. “If your, uh, lovely wife has some ready, I wouldn’t say no.”  
  
“Joce is out, I think,” McCoy mumbles, eyebrows furrowing restlessly for a moment, before he shrugs again, a short, sharp little movement as if he’s shaking off a creeping, unsettling thought. “She probably took Jo to dance class. C’mon in, then, the kitchen’s through to the back.”  
  
It’s with considerable reluctance that Jim follows McCoy into the big, dark, cool house. A shudder ripples up his spine, because this is wrong, horrifyingly, desperately  _wrong_ , and if the manufactured outdoors feel like that eerie stillness that often comes just before the mother of all storms, then this is somehow worse. It’s infinitely more personal and McCoy has filled his house with real mementos; photos and knickknacks and souvenirs, some of which Jim recognizes from their quarters and others that must be long gone. He wants urgently to leave, the hair prickling on the nape of his neck.   
  
There’s sunlight slanting in through the tall windows, thick and warm like honey. The sunlight is the only thing that doesn’t make Jim’s skin crawl, until he realizes, abruptly, that there’s no dust. No specks or motes dancing in the light.   
  
The clocks are creepy, too. There are clocks everywhere. A massive old-fashioned grandfather clock, pendulum frozen; blank digital wall panels; silent alarm clocks all describing different times of days – they’ve all stopped, or maybe they’ve never worked at all, time flowing on, passing them by indiscriminately.   
  
“Through here,” McCoy says, his voice louder than Jim expects in the deafening silence of the house. He startles, jerking his head away from a small antique timepiece, and continues through the long corridor after McCoy.  _Wood this old should creak_ , he thinks, his gut churning.  
  
The kitchen is small and cozy, painted a warm burnt sienna, and filled with well-used pots and pans hanging from the ceiling over the more modern island. There isn’t a single scrap of food anywhere in sight.   
  
“It’s a really nice place you have here,” Jim offers, for lack of anything else to say. The stopped clocks have shaken him for a reason he cannot place. He indicates a blank clock on the wall opposite, and asks, “Say, uh, does that say lunchtime? How about something to eat?”  
  
“Looks like it,” McCoy replies, glancing at the clock and then immediately letting his gaze slide away as if he can’t stand to look at it. “Just past noon, I guess. Hey, uh, Jim, is it? Jim, I –”   
  
“James Tiberius Kirk,” interrupts Jim, with a smile. “Guess I didn’t really do a good job introducing myself, after I showed up unannounced. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”  
  
“That’s a mouthful, for a kid so young,” McCoy replies politely, with a small smile, though there’s a lingering confusion about his expression, a flicker of something he can’t quite grasp. “You…look familiar, but I’m sorry, kid, I can’t quite place you. Look, maybe you oughta be going. The girls will be getting home soon. I’ve been…waiting for them,” he explains helplessly, spreading his hands in wordless apology. “Soon. They’ll be back soon. It’s been…some time.”  
  
Jim feels something sour uncurl in his chest. He doesn’t want to do this.   
  
“You wouldn’t think they’d be gone so long, huh, just coming back from a dance class,” he says lightly, leaning up against the counter and making no move at all to leave. “You know how long it’s been?”  
  
McCoy fidgets, hesitantly. “Not sure,” he says eventually, licking his lower lip and hooking his fingers in the belt loops of his pants. “Most of the morning, I’d wager, if it’s lunchtime now. Usually they’re home later.”  
  
“Didn’t seem like there was a lot of traffic around,” observes Jim, glancing out the window of the back door. He can see those looming mountains again, the ones that don’t get any closer, no matter how far you walk.   
  
“We’re pretty far out from town, so it’s quiet,” McCoy says, glancing over Jim’s shoulder, down the corridor that leads out to the front porch. “My office – I’m a doctor – is about ten miles from here,” he adds, distantly.   
  
“Oh, you’re a doctor?” asks Jim, struggling to sound casual, his eyes fixed on McCoy. “A sawbones, I guess, is what they used to be called. Or am I wrong?”  
  
“I – I’m not sure I – sawbones? That’s a morbid little piece of historical fact, kid, that’s from when doctors were nothing more than butchers,” McCoy says unsteadily, grounding himself by scowling in distaste and rubbing his temple absently. “Chopping off limbs like damn sadists. I think somebody used to call me that, though.”  
  
“If it were me,” says Jim carefully, “If  _I_  were giving you a nickname, I’d shorten it to ‘Bones’. That’s just me, though.”  
  
“Bones,” McCoy echoes faintly, his gaze drifting. The kitchen wavers, and then, quite suddenly, the two of them are back on the front porch, the sun still at its highest point in the sky, sunbeams beating down on the old house and the lush green grass, unchanging. Jim tries not to flinch. “That’s what it was. Must’ve been someone in med school.”  
  
“You were young, when you went to med school, I heard,” tries Jim, swallowing hard against the thick, hard lump in his throat. “Know anybody well enough to get a nickname, Bones?”  
  
“I wasn’t even twenty, yet,” McCoy agrees, frowning hard and scuffing the heel of his boot against the worn wooden steps. He doesn’t kick up any dust. “Look, kid, I don’t – I don’t know what you’re getting at. I didn’t have many friends, sure, I was busy, but I don’t remember who gave me that name, okay? Now, I told you, it’s best you be going.”  
  
Jim swallows every ounce of hope that launches up, hot and bright, and tries a different tactic. “Did you meet my friend Spock? He said he dropped by.”  
  
“Spock? The Vulcan?” McCoy asks, his forehead creased with worry-lines, his body language discomfited. “I ain’t never seen haircuts quite that bad on any other species, so it must be him you’re referring to.”  
  
“The Vulcan,” smiles Jim, amused. “Tall, thin, quiet, dry as – as bones. Did  _he_  meet your wife? Your daughter? Were they in, then?”  
  
“No, they – they were indoors, I think,” McCoy says, ill at ease. “He didn’t come in, said he couldn’t stay, but thanked me for ‘my surprising hospitality’, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. You boys have been my first guests in a while.”  
  
“Doesn’t look to me like there’s a whole lot of people around,” Jim says gently. “I guess it’d be a strain, keeping up with them all. You’d try to keep it simple, right?”  
  
“Keep what simple?” snaps McCoy, wrapping his arms around his body protectively and giving Jim a scrutinizing look. “Look, kid, it’s time for you to go. I’ve – I’ve got a headache. It’s been coming and going for days, now.” His expression smoothes a little, going slack, and he adds, “Did you like the tea? Joce makes the best sweet tea.”  
  
“You didn’t give me any,” Jim says simply, gazing directly at McCoy. “There was nothing at all in your kitchen, Bones. Nada, zip, zilch. And you have a headache because you’ve suffered some pretty serious trauma. You’re almost completely healed, physically, or so Chapel tells me. You’re just straining your brain for nothing, now, hiding away.”  
  
“It hurt,” McCoy says, lifting a hand to his head and shuffling over to the edge of the porch to sit on the steps, stretching out long legs. “There was something – in my head.” He presses both hands to his temples, hunching his shoulders. “I  _did_  give you tea, you thankless kid. I poured you a glass in those crystal tumblers Jocelyn bought in Atlanta. The girls came home. Then they went out riding.”  
  
“There’s no barn,” says Jim softly.   
  
“There is,” says McCoy, stubbornly. “It’s around back.”  
  
“M’Benga operated, Bones,” Jim continues, shaking his head. “You’ve been recovering. We just can’t wake you up.”  
  
McCoy grunts, resolutely not looking at Jim. They stare out at the farmland for a long, fragile moment, time stretching between them, and then Jim walks quietly to the porch steps and hunkers down just behind McCoy. He gently guides McCoy’s chin up, directing his face up toward the sky.   
  
“When did Jocelyn and Jo come home, Bones?” asks Jim. “When did we have that tea? We’ve been talking for ages, but – the sun hasn’t moved. I’ve never met Jocelyn or Joanna. I never will, not like this, because they’re on Earth, and you’re separated.”  
  
“They’re…around somewhere,” McCoy insists, jerking away from Jim’s hand, though his eyes still track worriedly across the sky. “Isn’t the weather good, Jimmy? It’s been real nice, this summer. Not too humid. Just like that summer before I moved to Oxford for med school. Summer I met Joce. There wasn’t a single day without sunshine and blue sky.”  
  
Understanding dawns like a wash of summer rain. Jim lifts his face to the sky and closes his eyes. He can’t feel the sun any longer.  
  


oOo

  
  
Spock pulls him out too soon.   
  
Jim controls his temper until he returns to his quarters –  _their_  quarters – and he has the foresight to reach for something disposable and unimportant to hurl across the room, rather than their small collection of precious framed photos. His PADD can be replaced.   
  
He almost had him, goddammit. Just a  _little_  longer –  
  
It’s not the pain of McCoy looking at Jim and not knowing him. It’s  _not_. Jim understands that, he understands how it happened,  _why_  it happened – Spock explained the delicate fragility of the human mind under stress, how McCoy had no control over his mode of refuge. The device scrambled his memories, his mind. Spock explained that it’s  _logical_  he retreated to an amalgamation of memories that preceded meeting Jim, and Jim gets that, too. If  _he_  had the option to construct his perfect home, life, family, wouldn’t he do the same thing?   
  
But Jim doesn’t have an ex-wife and a daughter he never sees; he hasn’t had that experience of a once-perfect future crumbling around him into something unrecognizable. He’s not sure  _what_  he’d do. As far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t have a past prior to Starfleet. Nothing worth going back to, anyway.  
  
It’s not that it hurts. It’s not. He’s not jealous, or resentful, he just –   
  
Fuck it.   
  
It hurts.   
  


oOo

  
  
He wakes up with his face pressed into the pillow, on McCoy’s side of the bed, breathing him in.   
  
It’s just past 0400 hours, and Jim, curled small and cold in the sheets, no one around to see him, lets himself cry.  
  


oOo

  
  
“You’re back,” says McCoy, and the way that he sits up on the porch swing, expression brightening in bewildered surprise, as if he’s not quite sure what he’s pleased about – it’s enough to make the cold press of doubt and desire and overwhelming need that Jim has been harbouring go spiraling away.   
  
Jim stands on the unchanged porch, and picks up the thread of conversation from their earlier visit. Time is meaningless here.   
  
“I was thinking,” he says, and McCoy snorts. “What?”  
  
“You,” says McCoy easily, his grin unfolding wide and bright. “ _Thinking_.”  
  
Jim pauses, mouth open, and McCoy blinks. “I don’t know why I said that,” he adds, quickly. “Sorry, kid. You were thinking?”  
  
Jim clears his throat. He can’t lose it yet. “You said this was like the summer you met Jocelyn. You must remember that time so well, huh?” he’d ask. “You felt so happy. Alive. Safe.”  
  
McCoy nods, slowly. “Sure. Of course.”  
  
Jim joins him on the porch-swing, sitting close enough for their knees to touch. “Bones, you’ve taken yourself back there. It’s a blend of memories and fiction – this isn’t real. I’m sorry, I know you feel safe here, but this isn’t  _real_ ,” he says gently. “You haven’t lived in Georgia for years now.”  
  
The air is heavy, this time, that pre-thunderstorm feeling coming back in a lingering wash of muted discomfort. McCoy is quiet, rocking the swing back and forth with the toe of one booted foot. He breathes out, shakily, and the unbearably close press of the sky fades a little.   
  
“But I want it to be real,” McCoy whispers miserably. He leans to the side absently, slotting his head naturally against Jim’s shoulder. “My head hurts, Jim. They had this thing, like a neural stimulator, but it _hurt_. I could see my entire life playing through like a vid-stream, I could reach out and brush my fingers through the images and – and my brain, my thoughts, it was like molten lead. I screamed and I screamed and I screamed. I woke up on the porch. I  _am_  awake.”  
  
“You’re not, Bones,” Jim smiles sadly, wrapping his arm around McCoy and resting his chin in his hair. “You’re in sickbay, in a coma, and you’ve been there for days. Spock’s been trying to wake you up, but he’s not getting anywhere – I think he must’ve given up on what he called ‘non-intrusive stimulation’, ‘cause he finally agreed to let me come instead. Do you know me, now?”  
  
“Yeah, you’re the intrusive kind of stimulation,” McCoy mutters dryly, wincing and then closing his eyes. “Jim. You’re the one that calls me ‘Bones’. Can’t this be real?” His voice is small, unfamiliar. “I didn’t do a bad job of it, kid, you gotta admit. This is my parent’s house. It was mine, for a while. And now Jocelyn is livin’ in it with someone who ain’t me. But I could just stay here.”  
  
“Your mind is already trying to tell you to wake up,” Jim says patiently. “No time passes here, Bones, none of the clocks work, there’s no food – it’s like the Twilight Zone. You know, in your heart, if not your head, that this isn’t real. Jocelyn and Joanna – they’re not here. Spock told me you kept talking about them, saying they’d come and gone again, but he never saw them, and neither have I. You won’t see them, if you stay,” he adds quietly.  
  
“Why can’t I?” McCoy asks in frustration. He leans into Jim’s body, aching for touch and trying to ignore the hot press of tears against the back of his eyelids. “They’re there in my head, I can remember them, but I can’t make them like I made this place. I tried.”   
  
He sighs shakily, a shudder that runs through his body and reverberates through the house. “All I could do was make miles and miles of goddamn farm.”  
  
“You can’t because you know it’s not permanent,” Jim replies. “You know it’s over. It served its purpose. You know Joce and Jo are both different now, Jocelyn’s with her new husband and Joanna cut her hair and had birthdays – this whole place is nice, Bones, it’s safe and quiet, but it’s – don’t you feel how  _wrong_  it is? It gets fuzzy, around the edges. I walked around. It’s just your house, some farmland, and then nothing.”  
  
Jim doesn’t want to push, but he’s on the very edge of a precipice he can’t even see, and it’s either time to jump, or retreat. This is where the world drops off. He isn’t leaving Bones here to waste away and die alone.   
  
“You could stay with me,” McCoy says, into his shirt.   
  
“Bones,” Jim whispers. “Bones, how could I stay here? It’s not real. If you don’t wake up, you won’t ever see me again. None of us. I can’t live in your head.”  
  
“I know,” sighs McCoy, a bone-deep, weary exhalation. “It  _all_  felt wrong, Jim. I was waiting and waiting, and I thought it was for Jocelyn and Jo, but they didn’t come. They weren’t ever going to come. It’s you I was waiting for, to set it all right, I just didn’t realize it. I knew if someone was going to find me here, it’d be you.”  
  
“I’ll always come for you,” says Jim. In the distance, the mountains are fading.   
  
“I don’t know how to wake up.”  
  
Jim strokes his hair with soothing motions of his fingertips and presses his lips to McCoy’s temple, then his forehead. “I’m here, Bones. I’ll keep you safe. Safe as I can. You just have to wake up. You just have to want it, Bones. I’ll be right there when you open your eyes.”  
  
McCoy takes a deep breath, and a whisper of wind filters through their hair. “Okay,” he murmurs, resting his forehead on Jim’s shoulder. “You need to go first,” he continues gruffly. “Get Spock to pull you back, because I don’t know what might happen to your consciousness if you stay here after I come to. God knows, the last thing I need is to wake up to some sort of medical emergency. I’m not performing brain surgery after a coma, Jim.”  
  
“Aye aye, sir,” says Jim, snapping off a smart salute. He gets up off the swing, letting go of McCoy reluctantly.  
  
“I’m going to tear all this down,” McCoy adds, standing up.   
  
“Don’t,” Jim blurts, standing on the steps of the porch, backlit by blue sky and sunshine. For a moment, he’s hazy and unfocused as he communicates with Spock, and then he shimmers like a mirage.   
  
“It’s kept you safe, it’s a good place. It’s just empty,” Jim calls out, his voice fading as his image flickers and dissolves. “Just leave it behind. I swear to Christ, Bones, if we’re not having a proper reunion kiss within, oh, the next minute, I’m coming right back here.”  
  
His voice is just on the edge of hearing, now, and with a final grin, he’s gone. The sun goes with him, sliding down the sky toward the blazing horizon.  
  
It’s dusk.  
  


oOo

  
  
“Hey,” says Jim.   
  
“Hey,” says McCoy, voice hoarse with lack of use.   
  
“You’re late,” accuses Jim, winding his fingers through McCoy’s and squeezing his hand. “That was, like, one minute and thirty seconds.”  
  
“The captain is exaggerating,” says Spock, from his spot on the other side of McCoy’s biobed. “It is – a relief to see you conscious, doctor. Please excuse me.” He nods to McCoy, who gives him a grateful smile, and slips out, pulling the privacy curtain shut.   
  
“I’m gonna go with the Vulcan,” says McCoy roughly, raising an eyebrow. “You do have a tendency to exaggerate.”  
  
Jim knows his eyes are wet. “Maybe it was more like a minute ten.”  
  
“Ah,” says McCoy, chuckling. “So where’s that kiss?”  
  
“I dunno, you look a little weak –”  
  
McCoy’s fingers, buried in Jim’s thick blond hair, show no signs of weakness as they pull him down hard for a firm kiss.   
  
“I missed you,” says McCoy, his voice wavering. “I didn’t know it then, but it was you that was missing. I always knew something was wrong, Jim.”  
  
“Missed you, too,” Jim sighs.   
  
***  
  
 _Awake,  
Light,  
Dusk._  
  
***


End file.
